Now I Know

Hope you had a great weekend! --  Dan   Lawnchair Larry The 2009 Disney/Pixar movie  Up  in an animated film and, therefore, able to take liberties with the truth pretty easily. That's good because the premise of the movie centers on the travels of a Carl Frediricksen, a 78-year-old widower who ties tens of thousands of helium balloons to his house and, as the title suggest, goes up into the sky. The flight of Mr. Frediricksen is as fictional as it gets. But had he tied the balloons to a lawn chair? Well, maybe  Up  could have been based on a true story.  In the early 1980s, Larry Walters was a truck driver from the Los Angeles neighborhood of San Pedro. He wanted to be a pilot growing up and tried to join the Air Force, but his eyesight wasn't good enough. Nevertheless, he never quite shook his dream of flying, and as a teenager, imagined floating above the ground in a contraption lifted by weather balloons. As an adult, Walters decided to give that i

A programming note: I'm taking Thursday off for Thanksgiving, I'm not sure yet what I'm doing Friday (probably a re-run), and tomorrow is a Weekendeiven the very long weekend. Thanks! --  Dan   The Madness Behind the Tea Party Charles Dodgson was an English mathematician. He taught at Christ Church, a college which is part of the University of Oxford, from 1855 until retiring in 1881; he remained there in residence until his death in 1898. He was a capable teacher but, by most accounts, an uncreative thinker when it came to the boundaries of math.  As the New Scientist noted , “even Dodgson’s keenest admirers would admit he was a cautious mathematician who produced little original work." Dodgson believed in a logically rigorous approach to the exploration of the discipline which was grounded in reality, while many of his more avant garde counterparts were dreaming up concepts such as imaginary numbers (that is, what you get when you take the s